Good morning, everyone, welcome to Valid's 2023 earnings results. My name is Marcos Valentini, I will be the emcee for this presentation. First, I have a few important disclaimers. This presentation is being recorded, all members are only listening to the translation. This is being translated into English, the material is available at Valid's IR website. The replay of this will be available soon after it concludes. After the presentation, we will start the question and answer session. Questions can be asked at any time during the event and can be sent using the chat. We also clarify that any statements that may be made during this conference concerning the company's business prospects, projections, and operating and financial targets are beliefs and assumptions of our board, as well as information that is available to the company today. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of performance.
They reflect uncertainties in the company because they future us, and therefore depend on circumstances that may or may not occur. Investors should note that general economic conditions in the industry, as well as other operating factors, can also have an impact on the company's future, and therefore depend on circumstances that may or may not occur. Today with me are Ivan Murias, CEO, and Renato Tyszler , CEO of IR. Ivan, I now pass the floor to you.
Good morning, Vale, and to everyone who is with us following this earnings call. What we are about to present is a result that fills us with pride. On behalf of the entire board and board of directors, I'd like to personally thank each one of Valid's more than 3,000 employees around the world.
Without their effort, dedication, and team spirit, we would not be able to write this new chapter in the company's long history. Many thank you. Starting with the highlights in Q1 2023. Turn of the year marked the beginning of a new stage for Valid. We now have a company without significant non-recurring items, which will facilitate analyses by all our shareholders and investors in general. The data that we'll show throughout today's material makes it clear that the efforts of all employees led to robust growth in all three verticals. This shows that we are moving in the right direction to deliver a better company for everyone. It's worth remembering that in two we finished some data in the United States.
As a result, Q1 2023 results will no longer include numbers from that region, and we will adjust historical data accordingly to compare the different periods. Let's get to the numbers. We closed the first quarter of 2023, BRL 99 million in revenue. That's 80% growth compared to Q1 2022, and 10% compared to Q4 2022. This double-digit growth shows Valid's current state. We have top-line growth while maintaining sustainable margins. The main contributions to our top line came from the ID and Pay businesses. In terms of the EBITDA, we reached BRL 149 million, which becomes a new quarterly record for Valid, representing growth of 51% year-on-year. EBITDA growth was achieved in all 3 verticals in the company, especially in the Pay segment.
We should highlight the EBITDA margin at 28.2%, which is the best result ever achieved by the company in any single quarter in its entire history. As we'd already mentioned in previous calls, after the adjustment we made in 2022, Valid would have a clean DRE, especially in the entries comparing EBITDA and net income. In this quarter, without any effects from non-recurring entries, we present net income of BRL 65 million. In the same period in 2022, we had posted loss of BRL 16 million. The quarterly result we've achieved is also a historical record for the company and represents about 3 times the entire net profit obtained in 2022. In the 2022 closing call, we mentioned we'd be looking in more detail at some of the new metrics starting in 2023, such as ROIC, which Renato will talk about a little bit later, and also EPS.
In the case of EPS, the result we obtained in this quarter indicates that BRL 0.75 per share is the correct value. In view of this result, the board approved yesterday the payment of BRL 0.18 per circulating share, which represents about BRL 14 million. This payment will take place on May 22nd, considering the shareholding base as of May 15th. In terms of leverage, Valid continues to have its net debt to EBITDA ratio close to the lowest historical levels ever with a comfortable cash position, factors which have made the company very well-positioned with great ability and scarcity in operations in that market. Let's look at the highlights for each by vertical. Starting with ID, where we had significant growth in issuance compared to Q1 2022.
At 7.5 with 0.6, we've seen strong volume due to new contracts that began in the second half of 2022 and capturing restricted volumes during the pandemic, as well as a significant strong EBITDA. A good part of this results come from our efficiency and as well as the economic scenario in Argentina, which has been continuing for a few months now, but which has given some very interesting short-term opportunities for Valid in that country. Although we do believe that this is a recurring result. We do not believe that it is sustainable in the medium and long term because it's associated with a macroeconomic framework that we cannot specify how long will last.
We have been frequently and diligently studying the Argentinian economic scenario with our local team there, who has been doing excellent business and operational work, and also with financial partners in that country. Finally, at Valid Mobile, we had another good quarter with a little chip volume, but without losing any top line results. In terms of EBITDA, this was the best result achieved by the company in the last 4 years. We will continue to keep our eyes on the development of the global semiconductor market, paying special attention to the re-increase in volume, which may lead to pressure in terms of price and margin in the near future. I now pass the floor to Renato, and we'll be back at the end for a final remarks. Renato, good morning.
Thank you, Ivan, and good morning to everyone who is with us today at our results presentation.
As Ivan mentioned, also as I mentioned in the last quarter, we are monitoring the ROIC again as a measure of the company's evolution, especially after removing non-recurring items. That is thanks to work done throughout 2022. That made our balance sheet more appropriate from now on with regard to our operation and also for monitoring this indicator throughout the different quarters. In 2022, we ended the year with 17.7% ROIC. In the first quarter of 2023, we moved to a 12-month accumulated ROIC of 19.3%. This is due only to improved operating margins in this quarter compared to Q1 2022. On slide 6, we highlight the message that we published during Q4 2022, where we reached the lowest leverage level in the company's history at 0.6 times.
We also show on the chart on the bottom left the development over the last two years, where you see that we moved from 3.2x to 0.6x. This effect is even more important because we also reduced net debt year-over-year by 45% to the current level of BRL 321 million. At a time when structural interest rates are so high and the market suffers from high financial expenses, Valid reduced those by 35% compared to the 1Q 2022, and that is already after removing the effect of the negative foreign exchange rate compared to last year. This puts us at a very comfortable position for rewarding our shareholders and investing in the company's future.
We can also continue to manage long-term debt with sufficient cash to pay practically all the titles that mature in 2023 and 2024. Of course, we will continue to talk with our partners and banks about the possibility of rolling over some of this debt with longer maturities and lower costs. On slide 7, I'll move a little bit more quickly because Ivan has already commented about the company's main results in the beginning of the presentation. It's never we have 1% EBITDA versus Q1 2022, which is a historical record for our quarter right now. We'll talk the next slide about the business unit, but this consolidated results reflects the growth and development of all our businesses. On slide 8, I just wanna show these two graphs to illustrate three main points.
First, throughout all of these years, even with the pandemic right in the middle, we've always posted positive quarterly EBITDA. Secondly, with the resumption after the pandemic, we can clearly see the quarterly evolution of our EBITDA results, especially with our consistency over the last 8 to 10 quarters. Thirdly, our net profit was quite negatively impacted in 2020 by the pandemic and in 2021 and 2022 by the foreign exchange effect after the restructuring and some other balance items that we also created during the restructuring, but which again gives faith for healthy profit. Especially given that the last 12 months at the first quarter of 2023, with all the non-recurring adjustments in Q2 within it, already represent a result that is practically the best in our entire history. This makes us very positive for the whole year.
In slide 9, we start looking at our three business units. In Valid ID, we had 31% revenue growth compared to the first quarter of 2022. This is due to the fact that in 2022 we still had a strong COVID wave in Q1, this had an impact in the volume of documents issued during that period. The new contracts that ramped up during Q3 2022 and are already in full effect in this quarter. In EBITDA, we had 69% growth compared to Q1 2022. In addition to the increase in volume we already explained, we also had gains in operating efficiency obtained by the different implementations throughout 2022 and by greater dilution of fixed costs for greater volume. Onto slide 10, we have the result of the Valid Pay BU.
Here we had 26% revenue growth, mainly due to the expressive increase in revenue in Argentina, where the country's closure ends up having a positive effect for local producers like Valid. In EBITDA, we had even greater percent growth, reaching 87% compared to Q1 '22. Despite a small drop in the volume of cards this quarter, Argentina had expressive gains in EBITDA, driven by the increase in revenue, and in Brazil, driven by gains in operating efficiency and portfolio management and client management. We therefore close out the quarter with a 21.6% margin, which represents 7% higher than the same period last year. On slide 11, we have the mobile unit, which represented stable revenue compared to Q1 '22, in spite of the lower volume sold during the period.
Here we see an effect of price increases that were practiced throughout 2022 and the chip shortage that has also been mentioned in previous quarters. In EBITDA, we had 11% growth compared to Q1 2022, another semester of margin between 20% and 30%. We understand that the effects of the chip shortage are showing the first signs of flexibility. As we mentioned in previous quarters, this could have a positive effect on volume, but a negative effect on margin throughout the order of quarters in this year and the next. On slide 12, we look at our net profit, where we see BRL 25 million in profit, which is higher than the years 2020, 2021 and 2022 combined.
This is equivalent to a BRL 0.75 EPS in the quarter, showing good prospects for 2023, the turnaround in liquid net profit compared to the previous year. On slide 13 and still on net profit, we show the development of Q1 '22, where we had BRL 18 million in loss. This development, moving on to BRL 65 million in the first quarter of '23, is mainly due to the increase in EBITDA and the reduction in financial expenses, partly because we eliminated almost all debt with our company from Spain. As a result, we also eliminated the negative exchange rate variation that occurred in '22, also interest due to a significant reduction in net debt during this period as I already mentioned.
On slide 4, we see the development of cash generation over the quarter where we had operating cash generation of BRL 58 million and BRL 548 million accumulated to date. All this shows that the two-year work we've been doing has given the expected result with consistent and growing EBITDA, even after CapEx and financial expenses, and all this with significant net profit. On slide 15, we show that there is no better way to visualize this effect than our share performance, especially compared to the Bovespa and small caps results. Both of those had 2.8% and 23.1% decreases, Valid had 19.3% growth during the same period. Of course, that doesn't mean we're satisfied, but it does show the impact of everything we've been presenting so far.
We paid BRL 23 million in JCP in 2022 as well as BRL 21 million in January, now in 2023. We've already announced a partial JCP of BRL 14.4 million to be paid this May. Finally on slide 16, we present some other events. The only item that hasn't yet been mentioned throughout this presentation was that every single item was approved during our meeting of shareholders, which was held in April. Thank you all again for being here. Now the floor is back to Ivan, who will talk about the main messages in this quarter. Before we move on to the final recap and to the Q&A segment, I think I should share with you this article published on the O Globo newspaper. It's likely that many of you have seen it, but have not noticed Valid's very important presence there.
Due to some of the state government's request, the official date for the new ID card implementation will change from March to November of this year. As far as we're concerned, we've already implemented the process in every state where we operate. The issuance itself is progressing at different speeds in each state. As the issuance progresses, we will also advance with invoicing for these new documents. In addition, we are very well-positioned in many different Brazilian states, and this has opened room for conversations between Valid and other companies, especially those that still issue their documentations in a primary manner. To recap the results of the quarter. We know that the company is going through a profound change in its operating conditions. We are moving from a condition of turnaround and recovery to consistent revenue growth, maintaining EBITDA and expanding profit.
This is all based on our solid capital structure. After the adjustments made to our structure, we are looking at record EBITDA profits in this quarter and net profits, enabling these earnings to be divided among shareholders sustainably. We continue to be alert and limiting our exposure to spreads that are high where the market is high demand. The digital government segment, where we're particularly well-positioned, seeking to leverage new customer products and solutions, all focused on everything that's happening around the world, around the demand for going paperless, the reduction of material in-intermediarization and centralization.
With a startup mindset as a company that has been reinventing itself for six, five years, we know that we are a company whose time has come. Great change of behavior in our society as we move to an increasingly digital world have brought people opportunities, tools and customers to the solutions where Valid has been investing, albeit more quietly than we should have been in the past 2 years. It is with this mindset that our CDC team continues to study opportunities that fit with our core. You will always be notified of any advances that we make. Thank you very much. Now let's move to our Q&A.
Thank you, Ivan. Thank you all for being here. I'd like to ask you to please submit questions using the Zoom chat. I will now take the first question.
This was sent by Carlos de Herrera. I will send this one to Renato. Please, could you give some more detail about consolidation and establishment of the Argentinian division? Is your balance there kept in $ or ARS? Whatever the case may be, when you consolidate into BRL, what exchange rate do you use, the official one or any one of the many different rates that are available on the market? Also I'd like to ask, what are the consequences to a potential hyperinflation or to consolidate this currency into BRL?
Well, thank you, Carlos, for your question. Now let me answer in steps. Firstly, in Argentina we operate in ARS, although a great deal of the business done there is dollarized. We do operate in ARS and then convert into BRL.
We always make all necessary conversions using the official Forex rates published by the Argentinian Central Bank. As for your second question, we are getting ready, especially considering that in these elections that will be held during the end of the year, there is a possibility that we will see an opposition party join the government, and that could result in Argentina closing its economy, at least in part. According to analysts, this could lead to even stronger devaluation of the peso, even going beyond the so-called parallel rate, which is the parallel peso that is used there. We've been preparing for that. What we have in cash or capital in pesos, we currently invest. This is giving us something like 70% or 80% return per year. All of the inflation in Argentina, we are recovering our investment.
The portion that we keep in dollars, we are currently studying the possibility of keeping some portion of assets in dollars, perhaps at a bank or other partner, such that if there is some kind of Forex variation, our USD supply will be protected. All that being said, our Argentinian working cash is currently rather low. Even if today there were a huge deflation or devaluation of the peso, this would not have a significant impact on our bottom line. That is due to the sum of all these numbers. Our exposure is low, but despite being low, we are taking steps in the event that a foreign exchange risk imposed in Argentina.
Thank you, Renato. The next question is also for you. This question comes from Fabio.
Without giving, could you please tell us what your expectations are for Q2 2023 and for the first semester of 2023. With forecast for profits at the end of 2023, is there still, within this fiscal year, any dividend payment? Well, Fabio, when we look at our projections over the rest of the year, let's look at business units. The ID business unit is still strong. It came from a strong fourth quarter of last year, remained strong in the first quarter, the trend is that we'll remain strong over the rest of the year. For as far as documents go, this is the largest business within the ID business unit with long, large volumes and all the operating efficiency remains and all the other work that we've been doing that will continue to drive us toward growth.
Looking at pay, we still see that the rest of the quarter and the rest of the year are going to remain strong. That's mostly due to the fact that Brazil has good, healthy volumes when it comes to portfolio, product and client management. They have very good profitability for us. Currently, Argentina, as we've been mentioning earlier, because of this transition, let's say the government, the Argentinian government closed some visa border. This has an impact on foreign producers, but it has a positive impact on local companies. As we are a local company there, our current results are likely to remain, at least for the time being, especially given that the election is only going to happen at the turn of the year and early next year. Again, Argentina is a country whose profits have some stability.
Everything that we have there is recurring. No results from Argentina are non-recurring, but they do have highs and lows as the Argentinian economy opens or closes as compared to the mean. Depending on how the country opens or closes starting in January 21st, our result can feel some kind of impact, but that's only for next year. For this year, 2023, our forecast is absolutely positive. For mobile, have a very good Q1, and that's also due to our management of higher added value products within our portfolio. It's also slightly explained by our inventory management and reduction in cost. Now, the question is how much flexibility will be seen in the global chip shortage scenario that has been dragging on for the past few years.
We expect that over the second semester of this year, the chip shortage will start becoming a little bit more flexible. That means that there will be some change in price as we start with more offers. Again, our volumes over the past year and this year suffered a significant reduction in volume as a result of the global chip shortage. We don't yet know how this will be translated to our result, but we are getting ready in the event that the chip shortage starts to become less pronounced. If that happens, we are ready to jump on the market, and I think that should give some perspective with regard to your question. Now, as for your second question, the answer is yes.
As we maintain our bottom line profits, and also as we keep our reserves in our capital, so we can pay dividends. Our primary concern is to, in fact, pay out dividends over the course of the year, pay out our JCPs, but that will depend on quarterly meetings that we have here in our board
Thank you, Renato. The next question. There are actually two people that asked similar questions. I will combine Yuri's question with Joe's question. With regard to the strong volume in ID, without giving guidance, can we consider that the 7 is recurring considering our new contracts, or should we discount some kind of backlog effect looking forward? What is the quarterly volume looking like without the effect of the COVID backlog? Thanks.
In practice, this Q4 2021, we reached a level a little bit above 6 million, which we consider to be a good baseline for the company. That's as we process something like 2 million documents per month. As we look at the second quarter of 2022 and on, with the inclusion of certain contracts, specifically the Minas Gerais RG, we see that the company's volume level rise to a new baseline, new level. On average, this has been representing 5% of our monthly volume, and the remainder is still partly attributed to those backlogs. We expect that the baseline is probably going to be something around 6 million in Minas Gerais, and the rest is probably explained due to the backlog.
As the CONTRAN's deadline, which has been set for the second semester of this year, this backlog volume should disappear and we will go back to normal. Something like 6 or 7 million per quarter is probably going to be a sustainable number for the company's operations looking forward.
Ivan, still on the topic of ID. Eduardo Dona asks, "What are the opportunities for growth in addition to the new ID that we can see today? Is there opportunity for gaining market share in CNH driver's license and RG IDs?"
Eduardo, good morning. I think in IDs, there's an important improvement in terms of product that you've been overseeing with us, as I imagine. Security is probably going to improve the product. We also have the polycarbonate operator that is going to start in the second semester.
As we understand the polycarbonate volumes, we will also understand the kind of impact that will have on our revenue. There are also some very important efforts in the fields of authentication and biometrics. These are very important businesses that are adjacent to Valid's businesses, and they are very strong. The company, for a long time, did not do business there, and these are markets where we really do want to do business. This is very close to our core. Still in the topic of government, we have a very interesting opportunity to help states move toward a paperless and digital civic documentation. For instance, we've been talking to Estonia. At the end of this month, we're going to sponsor the Week off in Estonia.
Many different states are going to be there, and some are even very highly advanced in investigating the opportunities that we are showing here, namely to improve civic and citizen interactions with public documentation and identification. I think this is a very interesting factor. I also should mention that our opportunities are not limited to ID. If we look at Valid Mobile, we have a very interesting opportunity to transform this market. For Valid in forms of platform. We have 43 contracts that we've signed with MNOs that use our Subscription Management platform. This is again, a great opportunity for considerable future growth for our business.
Thank you, Ivan. Moving on to the next question now that came from Bernardo. This is still investigating the topic of Argentina in a bit more detail. Could you explore the effect of Argentina on the company's EBITDA?
What is the representation of the so-called one-off in the reported numbers?
Given the restriction to capital, can we reasonably assume that the cash that was created by the operations in Argentina are being accessed by us investors?
Let me start answering your question. Argentina, in terms of representation, the first thing I want to make very clear, this one-off does not exist. This is all recurring. This is all part and parcel of our standard Argentinian operations, just like we have cards for every bank in Argentina. Talking about a one-off in this quarter or in any other quarter, that is not the case. What we are talking about here is our normal production and sale of cards in Argentina.
The issue, again, to clarify, is that Argentina is a country that has considerable economic instability, and this situation leads to results where we have higher margins in some years and lower in others. In terms of representation, in 2021, our EBITDA there was very close to 0. If you look at 2022, our representation there around 4%, something like 8%. The numbers will have due to the country's scenario and the competition that we find there. The situation is very favorable right now, and our forecast for the rest of the year is also favorable. For 2024, we forecast that it will remain positive, but that due to some situations that we cannot currently predict, like the election, they are article.
These results may have some variance that we cannot currently estimate. We are doing the very best to bring profits for our shareholders, rest assured. Onto your second point, we are currently the largest provider in Argentina. We have chips that we purchase around the world and that go to Argentina. The answer is yes, we can take vendor payments from Argentina. This is all done using the official ARS to USD exchange rate without any kind of debt for anyone. Now any dividends, any profit that is extracted by Argentina must be done in the form of dividend. This is true for any company that is operating in Argentina. No company can currently bring money out back from Argentina.
Right now, we are at a situation where in 2022 we had important recovery, and we did not have a very, very relevant cash buildup over the past two quarters. We are not currently concerned at all with any risk of accumulating too much cash there that can't be brought back to Brazil. This is not an issue at the moment, but we do understand that this is a crucial point for anyone who wants to do business in Argentina. There might be an appropriate moment in the near future where we have accumulated profits and where we can bring to Brazil official Forex rate when that rate is at a positive point for us. Thanks, Renato. Moving on to the next question from Alexander.
Could you share with us a few of the initiatives around GovTech and indicate what you forecast for revenues for the coming years? Just a ballpark estimate.
Good morning, Alexander. I would currently prefer not to give you any guidance because we don't yet, we're not familiar with the format of these deals because the official requests have not been published. When they are published, they may include CapEx, they may include OpEx. Those initiatives are all centered around the idea of the journey. We see that, for instance, in the distribution of services such as distributing school material, public school uniforms and other examples. We see this type of access to public service. We can say for sure that overall it is moving very significantly in different states overall.
It's not just a matter of creating a web portal and putting all the ministries and departments there. There are certain ways for all this to happen, and a very strong ID is a key element for this process. That means that using an official document issued by the state that includes biometric data for each given citizen. That's what I mean. We see many different states now moving to implement even wallets and electronic IDs. This is all centered around the idea of government-issued ID. At this time, we have sent documentation to meet different policymakers. For instance, the state of Minas Gerais has recently, very recently consolidated all the DETRAN. That means the DMV there into the Poupatempo structure there where we already operate. You can see in this change that they've made that they are better.
We also see in other states, especially in the Northeast, very strong initiative to ramp up the ID. This is designed, something that they designed, as a way of bringing more access to all the different citizens. This is, again, all goes hand-in-hand with what we're going to see in Estonia in the end of May. We're going to have a lot of content for the whole market. As we see each different initiative come to fruition, we will share with you specific results. Thank you, Alexander. Alexander Pfrimer had a second question as well. I will ask you, Renato, because it's about capital. Is there an estimate for the maintenance of at levels % or can we expect M&A movements in light of the very healthy capital structure we see right now?
Alexander, we are currently very, very happy with our leverage status, especially given the high and structural interest in Brazil, which should persist at least for the next few weeks. We're very happy that we designed the strategy and implemented it, and that we did it. It could have been very difficult. Instead, we arrived with a very comfortable position. With regard to M&As, we don't currently have anything that we can point to and say, "Oh, yes, this thing is going to have a result on leveraging." All the discussions that we are currently in right now, they happen to not have any impact on leverage. If there were anything different from these guidelines, they would certainly be discussed ahead of time. Thank you, Renato. That brings us to the last question that was asked in the chat.
I'd like to thank all of you for being here, Renato, Ivan, and the rest of the team. We are available through all the IR channels. If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to reach out. Have a great day, everyone.